This January, even before Sanjana Mudalige’s salary as a sales worker in a shopping mall in Colombo, Sri Lanka, was slashed in half, she had pawned her gold jewellery to try to make ends meet. Her story, reported in the Washington Post, is one of many in Sri Lanka, where people are watching their children go hungry and their elderly relations suffer for lack of medicines. The deeper and underlying causes of the crisis in Sri Lanka are barely mentioned by most mainstream commentators, perhaps because perhaps because they reveal uncomfortable truths about the way the global economy works. Ever since its “open economic policy” was adopted in the late 1970s, Sri Lanka has been Asia’s poster boy for neoliberal reform, much like Chile in Latin America. The payments due on these debts kept rising in relation to what Sri Lanka could earn from exports and the money sent back home by Sri Lankans working abroad.

Source: The Guardian July 27, 2022 01:24 UTC